As I attempt this week to get back into the saddle, two items – each relatively unusual and each involving Arkansas – grabbed my attention. One involves a judge and the other a lawyer.
Although Fridays are usually reserved for standard “follow ups,” the first item is in the nature of follow-up because I wrote previously about when this Arkansas judge was hit with disciplinary charges over his involvement in a protest against the death penalty around about the same time he was ruling on issues related to the death penalty in a case. The ABA Journal now has a story about the charges against the judge being dismissed by the Arkansas Supreme Court.
The reason for dismissal? The delay in the pursuit of the charges against him. The article notes that the charges were first filed against the judge back in April 2017. While both judges and lawyers alike subjected to disciplinary cases often feel like the process goes on longer than it should, and often times if you pay attention to the timelines in disciplinary opinions you see how extended the time frames often are between the opening of the case and the ultimate resolution, it is rare to see delay in disciplinary proceedings resulting in the outright dismissal of the charges. Twenty-six months would certainly be a long time if nothing at all was transpiring in the matter.
Of note, the article also mentions that the related ethics cases against six of seven justices on the Arkansas Supreme Court related to their treatment of the Arkansas judge in question (also discussed in my long-ago post) were also dismissed in November 2018 but the reasons for that dismissal are not mentioned.
On the lawyer side, a daily publication from the Tennessee Bar Association has started including disciplinary orders in its coverage of court opinions and, on Friday, it included the kind of order not seen every day on a number of fronts.
It is an order commencing a disciplinary case (or maybe not actually even truly doing that) against a Tennessee lawyer for having been convicted of a DUI offense in Arkansas. It’s unusual in a couple of respects in as much as historically there have not been many instances of any public discipline against Tennessee lawyers for criminal conduct involving drunk driving. While this order is certainly public in nature and can, itself, be something of a public censure for the lawyer involved, the order does not technically actually require the Board of Professional Responsibility in Tennessee to do anything about the situation.
The specific language of the order from the Tennessee Supreme Court reads:
This matter shall be referred to the Board for whatever action the Board may deem warranted.
Whether or not anything does come of it is unclear, the only provision that can be triggered by a DUI offense is RPC 8.4(b) and will turn on whether this particular criminal act is treated as one that “reflects adversely on the lawyer’s … fitness as a lawyer in other respects.” For what it may be worth, the lawyer in question does not have any past disciplinary history in terms of public discipline, but the Board’s website does reflect a pending petition against him that has been open since April 2018 so it would seem likely to be entirely unrelated to this offense which involved a traffic citation/arrest occurring in October 2018.